Funique VR Supervisor Ming-Yuan CHUAN worked on three projects that all finished at the same time under deadline for the Venice Immersive 2022. Red Tail is an animation piece that uses photogrammetry on built figures, and The Man Who Couldn’t Leave and All That Remains are both a stereoscopic 360 video that require an incredible amount of VFX stitching post-production work for each scene. Because each shot is a potential pitfall, then CHUAN works closely with directors during the pre-production and production phases to ensure that they’re not creating more post-production work to clean up the shots. There is an incredible amount of hidden labor behind each of these stereoscopic VR shots, which starts to call into question the finical viability of some of these types of ambitious and beautiful festival circuit pieces.

I had a chance to catch up with CHUAN to learn more about his journey into VR, and the variety of different 360 videos that he’s been involved with over the years including Your Spiritual Temple Sucks, Home, and Afterlife for Tomorrow. CHUAN also showed me some of his incredible 10K stereoscopic photo captures that he’s been taking of different cultural landmarks and events across Taiwan. He also talked about a previous VFX shot that he did in a piece called Perpetual War featuring photogrammetry statues that were animated that he showed to director Singing Chen, which inspired the final shot in The Man Who Couldn’t Leave. I also saw CHUAN taking full advantage of being at Venice by seeing as many immersive stories as he possibly could to see the latest storytelling innovations, and to take a bit of a break after working so hard to complete three different projects leading up to the festival.